


turning saints

by kirkaut



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Angst, Fake Marriage, Jealousy, M/M, Miscommunication, Possessive Harry, Slow Build, but only just
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-27
Updated: 2016-04-27
Packaged: 2018-06-04 09:52:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6653137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirkaut/pseuds/kirkaut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Oh, my God,” Roxy mutters, giving up her usual decorum in favour of slumping her head into her hands. “We’re going to be married, you idiot.”</p><p>Oh. <i>Oh. </i></p><p>“Not if that’s how you’re gonna ask me,” Eggsy tells her indignantly. “Honestly, Rox, is the romance gone already?”</p><p>(Or: Roxy and Eggsy have to play at being married for a mission. Meanwhile, Eggsy struggles to understand just why, exactly, Harry has been acting so rotten lately.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	turning saints

**Author's Note:**

  * For [missbecky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/missbecky/gifts).



> title is from the The Killers song. do I even have to name the one? ("jealousy, turning saints into the sea")
> 
> written for the incomparable missbeckywrites on tumblr, who probably was not expecting this when she gave me a prompt for a ficlet. at over 18,000 words I think we can all agree this is not a ficlet.

ooo

 

Eggsy’s just enjoying a nice morning cuppa with his mum when the text comes in.

It's a needy little thing, demanding his presence to rendezvous with Arthur, Merlin, and Lancelot at the shop. He sighs at the sight of it - it’s meant to be his day off, so he’s still in his pyjama pants and ratty undershirt - and again when another notification pings, telling him the Kingsman taxi will be ready and waiting outside of his home within the next ten minutes.

“Sorry, mum,” he apologises, shoving the last bit of his bacon sandwich into his mouth. He chews hastily and swallows too soon, sharp bits of toasted bread scratching at his throat on the way down, and chugs the remainder of his coffee in an attempt to soften it as it travels down into his stomach. “Duty calls.”

She gives him an understanding little smile over the rim of her own cup of tea, and he darts forward to press a crumby kiss to her cheek, smiling when she swats at him. “Go on,” she urges, waving her hand at him. “Shoo. Daisy’s off with your Nana today, so maybe I’ll have a spot of peace and quiet without you underfoot.”

Eggsy staggers back, hand pressed to his chest and affecting a wounded heart, but blows her a kiss all the same before bounding up the stairs and to his room.

There’s a bit of a haphazard struggle to fit himself into his suit on time, tie knotted properly and cufflinks secured nicely. His hair’s more of a lost cause, but he still makes an attempt to smooth it down from it’s bed-headed mess as he stumbles out the front door and into the waiting taxi. “Cheers,” he says to Gwaine, who’s been relegated to Cab Duty while Agravaine recovers from appendicitis. He slips into the interior of the car and takes the chance to tie his Oxfords’ laces, lest he trip over them any more than he has already. “Any idea what they’re on about today?”

Gwaine shrugs as he faces forward and turns the key in the ignition, meeting Eggsy’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Not sure, to be honest. Whatever it is, though, it’s got Arthur in a proper strop.” He lifts his hand in a wave that’s directed out the window and towards Eggsy’s house, and when Eggsy turns, he sees his mum perched in the doorway, shoulder leaning against the doorjamb. She wiggles her fingers at Gwaine in return, a soft smile playing at her lips.

“Oi,” Eggsy says, reaching through the partition and flicking Gwaine in the ear. “What ‘ave I said about flirting in front of me? Bad enough you’re dating my _mum_ , you fucking dick.”

“True love, Eggsy,” Gwaine announces as he pulls away from the curb. “There’s nothing like it.” A sly glance back in the reflective oblong shape of the mirror. “You’d know, wouldn’t you?”

Eggsy frowns and flicks him again, relishing in the quiet swearing he gets in return, and settles back into the taxi. “Dunno what you’re on about,” he says mulishly, and watches the Mews disappear behind them.

The two of them exchange a bit of friendly banter during the short ride, talking about Percival’s latest endeavor in Blowing Up All The Things I Can Manage In A Single Mission, and the R&D department’s latest attempt at developing an invisible car.

“It’s a shit idea,” Eggsy insists, still struggling to get his hair to lay flat. He gives up, if only for the moment, and hopes that the others will merely interpret the style as _artfully tousled_. “You seen that Bond movie, yeah? With, erm, Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry? The fucking car was like, the worst part of it, bruv. It’s ridiculous.”

“That movie was pretty shit,” Gwaine admits, turning the wheel and directing the car down Savile Row. “But Denise Richards was _so_ fit.”

Eggsy gives a hum of agreement as he inches towards the door, fingers gently curling over the handle. “Pierce Brosnan’s more my type, to be honest,” he admits absently, watching as the golden sign for the Kingsman storefront crawls ever closer.

Gwaine lets loose a ragged snort of amusement. “The older gentleman spy, more your type?” he says, and shakes his head while he laughs to himself. “Nobody would’ve guessed _that._ ”

Eggsy frowns, bristling. “What? The fuck you mean by that?”

“Your stop, sir,” Gwaine tells him, in lieu of any real answer, and brakes in front of the shop. “Kindly get on with it, I’m meant to go pick up Bors from Heathrow next.”

Eggsy climbs out of the car but before he shuts the door, he turns around and wags a finger in Gwaine’s face. “We ain’t done talking about this!” he insists, and slams the door shut. Gwaine gives him a cheeky wave as he pulls away from the curb. “An invisible car is a _shit idea!_ " he shouts after him. An older woman passes by, not long after, and he does his best to give her his most charming smile, like he hasn’t just blared a swear word directly into her ear. She gives him a shrewd look and turns quickly away, hustling down the pavement.

Eggsy sighs and turns to face the shop, making one last attempt at fixing his mop in the reflection of the storefront window, before giving it up absolutely and completely and walking inside.

Leodegrance is re-arranging the pocket squares behind the register, but turns when the door chimes. He gives Eggsy a small bow, a polite bastard almost to a fault, and informs him that the others are already waiting at the Round Table.

“Cheers, Leo,” Eggsy says, smiling and clapping the older agent on the shoulder as he goes to trot up the stairs. An exasperated sigh follows him up and Eggsy has to bite down on his smile. He has to make an actual _attempt_ to appear composed while he’s in a meeting with Arthur, he supposes, even if he privately finds it very hard to do so.

He knocks on the closed doors, adjusting his tie while he waits for a familiar voice to bid him enter.

The door opens of its own accord, instead. Merlin stands on the other side, drawn up into as imposing a figure as he can manage, and his eyes immediately drift to Eggsy’s hair. “Did you somehow manage to electrocute yourself on the ride over?” he asks with disdain, tucking his clipboard beneath his armpit and reaching out with both hands to plant them firmly on Eggsy’s head and smooth down. It probably doesn’t yield any results beyond Merlin’s satisfaction at bothering Eggsy, so he swats away the offending hands with a sharp, “Knock it off, man!”

“Merlin,” comes Arthur’s voice from the back of the room, sounding distant and tight in a way that makes Eggsy frown. “If you’ve kindly finished assaulting Galahad, there is the small matter of the _mission_ to attend to.”

Merlin just rolls his eyes and looks very put upon, which is no different than his usual expression, but he lets Eggsy go and turns away to stride towards the ornate mirror on the wall. The screen flickers to life as he approaches, Kingsman sigil rotating slowly in the frame.

Eggsy brushes his lapels and adjusts his cuffs as he enters. Roxy is perched in her own seat, spine straight and hands clasped delicately in front of her, tortoiseshell glasses already perched on the bridge of her nose.

Harry’s standing in the back, hands tucked behind his back and his face towards the wall, but he does glance back over his shoulder when Eggsy begins to walk into the room. He turns away almost immediately, and Eggsy’s good mood sours just a touch at the quiet dismissal. “Galahad,” Harry says, and his good mood curdles even further. He hasn’t heard Harry sound this far away in ages, and he doesn’t care for it. “Sorry to intrude on your time off, but needs must.”

“No worries, sir,” Eggsy says, affecting his own posh accent - the one he knows that Harry hates. Sure enough, the already straight line of Harry’s shoulders tenses further, then rises and falls with a deep breath. He crosses to his own seat and settles in, one leg crossed over the other and his hands knit together atop his legs. “What seems to be the problem?”

Harry’s hands unwind and flex behind his back. He reaches in front of himself, picking something off of the small table that sits against the wall, and turns around. The files, when they’re thrown, uncharacteristically, onto the table, hit the hard wooden surface with a resounding and emphatic ‘thwack.’

“Your latest mission,” Harry says from his perch at the head of the table, fingers curled around the tops of his chair as he stands behind it. It’s an unnecessary explanation, given that Eggsy and Roxy don’t exactly go about HQ receiving manila folders willy-nilly, but other than a brief look of humour between them, they don’t say a word about it. “You're to investigate the disappearance of several couples from a retreat facility in the Florida Keys.”

“Ohh,” Eggsy says, dropping the polite pretense and grabbing for the folder that’s nearest to him. “A holiday!”

Harry gives him a withering look, to which Eggsy responds with a beaming example of his most charming grin. He can tell the moment that Harry’s deep (deep... _very_ deep, way down inside) and unyielding fondness for him smoothes out a few of the tiny frown lines between his brow, if only because watching Harry with a fanatic level of closeness is one of Eggsy’s very favourite things to do.

The withering look doesn’t let up, but it does soften some, and Harry carefully deposits himself into his seat. “Restrain yourself, Galahad,” he requests dryly, but his foot knocks into Eggsy’s beneath the table.

Eggsy does his best to smother his grin into his folder, but judging by the unimpressed look Roxy shoots him from across the table, he fails utterly.

He trains his attention on the folder in his hands, but it takes more than a little effort, distracting as it is to have Harry so closely nearby.

“No offense intended, sir,” says Roxy, ever the consummate professional. “But, what, precisely, do these disappearances have to do with Kingsman? Shouldn’t the Statesmen claim this as their jurisdiction?”

“Normally,” Harry says, knotting his fingers together and leaning forward in his seat. “Yes. But, as we all know, their ranks have yet to rise to their former numbers before most of them defected to Valentine’s lure.”

Eggsy shifts guiltily in his seat at the reminder, seeing plumes of colourful smoke and brain matter in his mind’s eye. Merlin, for his part, merely coughs once into his hand.

“In addition to that fact,” Harry continues, as though nothing has happened, “it appears that whomever is going about kidnapping these couples is targeting, specifically, young couples from Britain. There have been three to speak of thus far, and Merlin has been so kind as to include some rather...thorough profiles of each individual, in the hopes that perhaps you will be able to make a connection that we have thus been able to form.”

Eggsy flicks through the pages and finds the papers in question, quickly skimming over the grim-faced passport photos and the cursory information printed next to each.

“So, we’re...what,” he asks, still thumbing through the files on the missing couples. “Posing as hotel staff?”

A heavy silence follows this question, and Eggsy finally tears his gaze away from the dossier to frown up at the other three agents in the room. “What?” he asks slowly, not understanding the pointed look Roxy is trying to give him. Merlin’s still studiously staring at the monitor on the mirror, but Harry is clutching at his own hands like he wishes he could strangle something between them.

Eggsy carefully closes the file and sits up straight in his chair, leaning away from all of them ever-so-slightly.

“Eggsy,” Roxy says, voice soft and low, and her eyes dart towards Harry furtively before ducking back down to her own packet of information.

“Not...hotel staff, then?” Eggsy guesses, looking from Roxy to Harry. He lifts his shoulders in a shrug when she lets out a huff and rolls her eyes at him, lips pursing like he’s very firmly disappointed her somehow. _‘What!’_ he mouths, but she only glares harder in return.

“You’re,” Harry begins, but has to pause to clear his throat and take a sip of water. “Lancelot and yourself, Galahad, are going to be given identities as David and Laura Sterling.”

There’s another pointed silence that Eggsy doesn’t quite understand the depth or meaning of. “So...siblings?” he hazards. He supposes that he and Roxy could pull that off - they look similar enough, what with the dark blonde hair and the strong jaws.

“Oh, my God,” Roxy mutters, giving up her usual decorum in favour of slumping her head into her hands. “We’re going to be _married_ , you idiot.”

Oh. _Oh_.

“Not if that’s how you’re gonna ask me,” Eggsy tells her indignantly. “Honestly, Rox, is the romance gone already?”

The echoing sound of all three aggravated sighs would quell a lesser man, but Eggsy just sends a cheeky grin around the room and settles back into his seat, folder open in his lap and Harry’s foot nudged up carefully against his own.

"All I'm saying," he continues, splaying his hands out in a placating gesture. "Is that a hot young thing like me deserves to be wined and dined a little. Can't just spring a marriage on me like that. You'll enjoy it," he assures Roxy with a playful, insincere leer. "Promise."

"Don't flatter yourself, Eggsy," Roxy instructs him primly, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose and resuming her own inspection of their mission files. "You're hardly my type."

Eggsy sputters indignantly, still playing along, but he can't help but smile when Merlin indulges in a rare moment of public affection and runs his hand along the line of Roxy's shoulders as he passes.

Out of the corner of his eye, he even sees Harry crack a small smile, though it’s tinged with a sadness that makes his own heart cinch.

"Here are your identity profiles for this mission," Merlin says, handing Eggsy and Roxy a much smaller folder, marked with DAVID STERLING and LAURA STERLING, respectively. “You’re not off for another fortnight, so take your time to really familiarise yourselves with these aliases. In the meantime, I’ll be sure to build up a history under these names - social media profiles, photoshopped holiday photos, credit history, and the like. Make it all a bit more believable, should anyone else do some digging.”

Eggsy nods and opens the folder, looking down into his own sombre face peering up from a simple albeit grainy picture, then snaps it shut again. He gathers both dossiers into his arms and stands, dipping his head in farewell. “Thanks, mate,” he says, dropping the insolent act and letting his genuine gratitude bleed through. He knows that Merlin has been working himself damn near to the bone these days, and has been ever since the Valentine’s Day Disaster of yesteryear. The reminder, on top of the way Harry has hardly looked at him once since he walked into the room, is enough to mellow his good humour. He can’t quite help the way his eyes linger across Harry’s profile, silently willing him to look Eggsy’s way.

A moment passes with no such luck, and Eggsy won’t let his shoulders wilt no matter how desperately they want to. Still, he can’t muster up a completely genuine smile when he turns away and finds Roxy peering up at him with a sympathetic look in her eyes.

He sighs and tucks his other hand into his trouser pockets and leaves the room, doing his best to keep his feet from dragging as he goes. He meanders through the halls and down the stairs, ignoring the familiar murmur that speaks of voices trying, and failing, to have a hushed conversation while he's still nearby. Roxy's tone sharpens abruptly as he turns the corner, but the words are not directed towards him and indistinct, besides.

He gives Leo a polite but subdued wave as he walks past the till, and waves off Ector when he goes to open the door of the cab that's parked out front.

"I'll walk, I think," he explains needlessly, gesturing down the road with his free hand.

The other agent frowns and takes a small step forward. "Everything all right?"

"Yeah," Eggsy says, but even he can tell his heart isn't in it. "Yeah, just...need a chance to clear me head a bit, that's all."

Ector looks totally unconvinced, but allows Eggsy to trundle on without another word.

The walk back to his home in the Mews is going to take the better part of an hour, but he does genuinely need the time alone to get his head on straight and attempt to parse out what it is that's been going on with Harry as of late.

The standoffish attitude he's just displayed in their impromptu meeting is, unfortunately, not a new development. He's been especially peculiar ever since a mission had gone awry a few weeks back, when Eggsy had found himself temporarily in the grips of Hungarian gangsters. He'd come out of the ordeal minus the last seventy-two hours of his life and plus a couple bruises, lacerations, and burns, but considering all his limbs had still been attached and in one piece, he couldn't really find it within himself to complain.

Harry, though, apparently had found _plenty_ to complain about. He'd ripped into Eggsy for a solid half an hour while Medical tended to him in the back of one of their larger taxis, spouting off all the ways he'd cocked up his mission and his various reckless behaviours of the past. He'd flayed him alive with every acidic, bitten off word, until Eggsy was almost yearning for the heavy hand of his new best friend, Mathias, if only because it would mean he'd be unconscious and not subject to Harry's endless laundry list of Ways Eggsy Is A Disappointment.

The only reason the diatribe had even come to an end was because Eggsy had suddenly doubled over and vomited all over the pavement that sat between him and Harry, and Ywain (who, when not busy being Snidely Whiplash and tying drugged up twenty-somethings to train tracks, is something of a miracle worker when it comes to healing various bumps and bruises) had summarily banned Harry from Eggsy’s person for the next twenty-four hours. Or, as he’d very sharply put it, until he “managed to retain some semblance of professionalism and not further harass an agent not yet on the mend from _fucking torture_.”

(Eggsy’s opinion of Ywain has grown by leaps and bounds since their first meeting, but he supposes that’s not terribly impressive when there’s not far up to go from ‘fuck this fucking arsehole.’ Still, the man knows his way around a suture or a broken bone, and practically dotes on Eggsy whenever he has the misfortune to find himself in Medical.)

Harry had reeled back at the admonishment, looking for all the world like he’d had the rug very firmly yanked out from under him, and his gobsmacked, wide-eyed expression was the last thing Eggsy saw before he was ushered into laying back onto a stretcher and loaded into the taxi.

Harry hasn’t quite looked at him normally, ever since.

Eggsy blinks himself back into the present, and has to fight back a frustrated sigh when he looks down and finds himself in front of an irritatingly familiar sight.

His feet, apparently more in tune with his inner turmoil than with his desire to go home, have led him a bit out of the way and stopped him directly in front of a park bench.

 _The_ bench. _This_ bench, the spot he’d retreat to in the more immediate weeks following Harry’s return from supposed death. This was where he’d go when he needed to escape HQ and the shop and find a spot of peace and quiet where he could let the anger that simmered inside, slowly boil away.

He stares at the gently sloping lines of it, the places where the paint is chipping and the sticky looking spot where someone must have spilt their drink, and feels nauseated at the lingering feelings of anger and resentment it inspires.

“Might as well,” he mutters darkly, thinking of Harry’s pointed inattention, and carefully seats himself away from the sticky spot.

He leans against the back of the bench and closes his eyes; breathes deep in and out through his nose in an attempt to calm the way that ire has sent his heart racing. He concentrates on the gentle summer wind that brushes against his face, the way he’s starting to sweat a bit beneath the trappings of his armoured suit, and the fading sting across his shoulders from a sunburn he’d acquired on a mission in Costa Rica a few days prior. He listens to the indistinct hum of life in London - the whoosh and rumble of cars going past, the occasional blaring horn, and the chatter of a thousand different voices talking all at once. Listens to the rustling of the dossier papers in the wind, to the sound of footsteps scuffing quickly over the pavement and coming closer -

He opens his eyes when a shadow falls over him, and blinks up into Harry’s slightly flushed face.

“Eggsy,” Harry says, after a moment of silence between them.

Eggsy merely raises his eyebrows in greeting and doesn’t say a word.

Harry’s eyes flit over the expanse of the bench and there’s no mistaking the way his brows draw together or his mouth curves down into a frown. He shifts his stance, looking all the world as if he’s standing on the wrong feet. He’s as familiar with this place as Eggsy, having come sought him out on more than one occasion in those unbearably tense two months. This bench has seen its fair share of arguments between them, more than a decent amount of bitter tears and even more bitter words, and never even had its chance at any sort of redemption, given that they’d finally had it out on the grounds of the manor (complete with half-shouted apologies and gripping hugs) and summarily never returned to this bench again.

Eggsy feels a mean sense of satisfaction tickle at the back of his brain, seeing how visibly uncomfortable Harry is to find him perched upon this bench once more.

“Something you needed, sir?” he asks, keeping his face as stoic as possible and his tone neutral.

The way Harry’s shoulders slump in response is almost audible. “Eggsy,” he says, chiding and pleading all at once. “Please. Don’t be like that.”

Eggsy finds it hard to keep looking at the defeated slope of Harry’s spine, the nervous way he’s shoved both of his hands into his pockets, so he redirects his gaze to the thick packet of papers still clenched tightly between his fingers. “I’m not _being_ anything, Harry,” he mutters, and scrubs a hand over his still wild hair. “If there’s one of us who’s acting any kind of way, we both know it ain’t me, bruv.”

The soles of Harry’s shoes make a soft scuffing noise against the pavement when he shifts his weight back onto his heels. “You’re right,” he admits, and Eggsy can’t stop the way his head shoots up at that, incredulous. “I know I’ve been unfair to you recently, Eggsy, but you must know it’s nothing you’ve done. I’m...working through some,” he purses his lips, searching for the right words. “Personal developments. I’m afraid I need to ask you to patient with me a short while longer.”

He peers up at Eggsy with a hopeful little smile from where he has his head bowed, brown eyes soft and pleading over the frame of his glasses. There’s a misplaced lock of hair draping its way across his forehead, unusually unkempt and curling, like it was misplaced in his trotting around after Eggsy. The entire picture he creates, looking warm and golden in the morning sun, is so devastatingly gorgeous that Eggsy’s heart hitches in his chest.

“So, you don’t - ” Eggsy starts, but bites down on the words that threaten to trip ungainly between his lips. He sucks his tongue between his teeth and huffs out a long, slow breath, cheeks puffing with the force of it. “Nevermind,” he murmurs, shoving his fingers up under his glasses to rub at the bridge of his nose and across his eyelids.

“I don’t what?” Harry urges, instead of dropping the fucking subject like any sort of decent person who doesn’t want to make Eggsy’s morning any more unhappy would.

Eggsy screws up his face and inhales sharply through his nose before squinting up at Harry, one eye more tightly shut than the other. “You don’t hate me or nothing?” he questions haltingly, feeling ridiculous even as he asks. God, what a sad fucking sight he must be, pouting on a bloody public bench and simpering after his boss’ favour like a lovesick fool -

“No!” The word bursts out of Harry, emphatic and startled. “Jesus Christ, Eggsy, _no_. Of course I don’t hate you, how could you ever think that?”

He sounds so genuinely upset by the prospect, by the fact that Eggsy’s been in any doubt, and almost immediately Eggsy wants to erase that tone from his voice and sweep this conversation under the heaviest rug they can find.

“It don’t matter,” he assures him. “Shit, just - forget I said anything, yeah?”

Harry’s expression grows, if possible, even more horrified. “I will _not_ ,” he insists, and in an uncharacteristically graceless motion, slumps onto the bench next to Eggsy. He’s mindful of the sticky spot, though, and it presses their legs together all along the side. “My God,” he mumbles, pressing his palms together in a prayer and tipping his index fingers to rest against his mouth and chin. “I’ve well and truly cocked this up, haven’t I?”

Eggsy can’t think of any sort of response, attention too closely drawn to the way he can feel Harry’s thigh against the line of his own, how he can almost feel the shifting muscle of his calf as he flexes his foot.

For his part, Harry appears to take Eggsy’s silence as an agreement. “Patience is all I’m asking for, Eggsy,” he reiterates, and this time there’s no mistaking the fact that he’s pleading. “Only for a while longer, and then I promise you.” His hand slips over the curve of Eggsy’s knee and squeezes. “Everything will be set to rights.”

“Okay,” Eggsy whispers, in a voice so soft that it’s nearly lost to the faint breeze, because all the breath had been utterly knocked from his lungs the minute Harry’s gentle, long-fingered grasp had found its way across his knee.

Harry smiles at him in response to the tentative agreement, and Eggsy’s gut drops and settles somewhere about his ankles.

With all the past few weeks of strange tension between them it seems that he’s forgotten, even as he can’t help but give a smile back, just how much farther in love with Harry he falls with every passing touch.

What a fucking _idiot._

 

 

ooo

 

 

Falling in love with Harry may be the stupidest thing that Eggsy has ever done, and Eggsy has purposefully crashed into a police car and let himself get arrested.

Which, to be fair, had led to some fantastically amazing stuff, but still: not exactly his smartest moment.

He’s heard a number of anecdotes about love, with varying degrees of sappiness. Love is _patient_. Love is _blind_. People do crazy things when they’re _in love_. His favourite might be _‘Love makes fools of us all,’_ if only because it’s so painfully relevant to his own hopeless situation.

It - the big, unspoken ‘it’ that constitutes his heartsick pining after Harry - is idiotic for a number of reasons, those reasons being:

  1. Harry, for all intents and purposes, is Eggsy’s boss. He’s not sure what kind of dating policy Kingsman has - he’s not even sure they have one at at all, to be honest, since it wasn’t until the late eighties that they had a progressive enough Arthur to include female agents - but he can’t imagine that it’s appropriate in any way, shape, or form for the man at the top of the tier to go scrounging about with someone like Eggsy.
  2. Harry is so bloody far out of Eggsy’s league he’s practically orbiting Neptune while Eggsy flounders about in the magma of Earth’s core. Legs that go for miles, dashing good looks to complement that debonair attitude, and a smile that could charm the most curmudgeonly of fucks. Eggsy knows he’s nothing to shake a stick at when it comes to looks - his nose is a straight slope and his face is almost perfectly symmetrical except for the chip in his left eyebrow - but Harry is drop dead gorgeous.
  3. Eggsy didn’t even realise he was falling in love with Harry until it was unequivocally and hopelessly too late.



The truth of the matter is, that while Eggsy had idolised him almost to a fault and been properly, totally devastated when he thought that Valentine had murdered Harry, the two of them had barely known each other when Harry ‘died.’

Harry had been too busy chasing after Professor Arnold, then in a subsequent coma for months while Eggsy threw himself into his training in an effort to make a near-stranger proud. He’d sat at Harry’s bedside, studying for his written exams and pouring over the files of missions long since in the past, learning the ins and outs of Kingsman’s history as best he could, and practically sprinted to his room in Medical when news broke that the man himself was up and about at last.

He had felt stopped in his tracks when Harry had turned to face him, practically still dripping from his shower and looking at him with a shrewd brown gaze, and felt the cold wash of reality upon him.

It was one thing to hold lengthy, one-sided conversations for weeks on end with a person who had no hope of responding or reciprocating, and quite another to suddenly have them able to do just that.

He’d fallen in love with Harry, just a bit and in his own way, in those few silent months, but it was the kind of love that didn’t last because it wasn’t _real_ , and so it faded as time went on.

He’d felt something similar begin to grow, though, the longer that Harry was awake and the more time they were able to spend with one another, however fleeting. The fluttering of his heart when Harry was near, the tightness in his gut when he caught a waft of his cologne, and even the thrill that went down his spine when Harry reached out a rare hand to clasp Eggsy on the shoulder, all seemed more cautious in the wake of that false love.

There was no mistaking the _something_ that hovered between them, though, that night after the fucking train test with Ywain, when Eggsy had been made silly by vodka and Harry had been tipsy enough to strip down to his dress shirt and shoulder holsters, tie in a messy pile on his desk and the top few buttons of his shirt undone. There’d been a desk and at least two metres between them, but when the alcohol made Eggsy brave enough to splay his legs open a bit further and to stare unabashedly at Harry, there’d been no mistaking the tension in the air when Harry noticed and his breathing had hitched.

The desk and the two metres had all at once seemed too far and too close a space to breach.

Breakfast in the morning had been a loaded affair; the two of them uniting at the table after having spent the night in separate rooms, despite lingering inches away from one another as they shared ‘good-nights’ and running hooded eyes across each other’s features. It was hard to forget the sensation of an opportunity lost when it still felt like the opportunity was being presented to you in the form of a full English breakfast and Harry’s hair, still damp from his morning shower, curling at the base of his neck.

The echo of that emotion had lingered, and flared into a bright and painful heat in the center of his chest the day he watched Harry get shot in the head. A person had been lost to him, yes, but not a lover.

Which had been a kick in the bollocks, if he’s being honest.

Losing something so precious as a _possibility._

There’d been a weird mourning period in his life that wasn’t exclusively for the man himself - though Eggsy had mourned Harry, and done it with a level of despair he’d thought himself previously incapable of reaching. He’d also had the dumb fucking luck of finding himself wearing widow’s weeds not only for Harry, but for the death of a chance at something bigger between them.

He’d been stuck in an endless cycle of feeling sorry for himself but slowly getting over it, and it had naturally been at the very end of all of this, just when Eggsy was finally feeling like he’d be able to get a move on with his life, that Harry turned back up like fucking Lazarus and sent the world tits up.

His sudden reappearance - hale and mostly whole except for the fucking _bionic eye_ in his head and a large swath of scar tissue that spidered out from his left eye socket - was combined with the unfortunate realisation that Merlin had known all along, and played both him and Roxy and all of Kingsman for fools.

Eggsy had been _livid_ , to say the least. More than that, he’d been absolutely, wretchedly, unashamedly _hurt_. The sting of betrayal had gone deep, down into the very core of him, and he’d nearly walked away from Kingsman for good the day Merlin had ushered him up to the Round Table and he’d found Harry at the head of it.

Because damn it all if he and Merlin hadn't grown to be actual, genuine friends in the year that spanned Harry's absence. Merlin had been the one Eggsy had turned to when he had a crisis of conscious over keeping so many secrets from his mum, who had sat down with him at least once a day while Eggsy spent weeks agonizing over whether or not to tell her the truth. He'd even been a quiet pillar of support for Eggsy, standing quietly at his side when he ultimately made the choice to come clean. Hiis mum had needed hours of reassurance that Merlin had provided in the form of statistics on mission success, the low mortality rate in Kingsman’s history, and all the technology at Eggsy’s disposal that was designed purely with the intent to keep him alive and kicking as long as possible.

Eggsy had even suffered through a few agonising conversations with Merlin on how to properly make his intentions towards Roxy known, like some sort of Victorian bastard with a mind for courting. All of his efforts only made it that much worse when Roxy had shown up at his house after Harry’s return, looking unkempt and red-eyed and clearly suffering her own share of heartbreak, but determined to be at Eggsy’s side.

That closeness and confidence that Harry’s year-long absence had afforded Eggsy and Merlin had felt like nothing more than a twisted illusion when he turned his disbelieving gaze from Harry’s subdued but anxious expression, and had seen the guilty slump of Merlin’s shoulders, the way he deliberately avoided meeting Eggsy’s eyes.

He’d stood abruptly from the chair that Merlin had ushered him into, knocking it back down onto the expensive carpet beneath his feet. “You...you _knew_ ,” he’d accused, seeing the truth of it in the way that Merlin had flinched back. He’d stumbled away, tripping over himself in his haste to distance himself from their deception, ducking out of Merlin’s reach. His own left hand had scrabbled along his right, pulling off his signet ring and flinging it across the heavy oak table with a metallic clatter.

“Fuck you,” he’d spit. “The both of you.”

He’d turned on his heel and left, and that was the very first time he’d ever found himself at the park bench, contemplating his own future.

The weeks that followed had been nothing short of a clusterfuck, with Eggsy and Roxy speaking to no one but each other and Harry and Merlin going almost painfully out of their way in an attempt to talk to them both. Hundreds of half-started explanations, dozens of apologies stunted before they could see fruition, and at least seven shouting matches that had led to Eggsy nearly screaming himself bloody.

In a perverse sort of way, it had been easier for Eggsy to forgive Harry for the lie. After all, he had spent nearly half of the year lying comatose in an American hospital, listed as a John Doe for the first two weeks before they accidentally activated his glasses and sent a signal out to Merlin. He'd shown up not long after, citing issues with the Statesmen as the reason for his absence from HQ, and made arrangements with the hospital for Harry's continued care in a private room. In retrospect, it had helped make sense of why Merlin reacted so poorly whenever another agent would offer to assist him with whatever troubles the Statesmen were having, as well as accounting for the lines of exhaustion that permanently marred his face.

Still, Harry had been almost easy to forgive, what with being unconscious for five and a half months and barely lucid for another two after that. Most of the year had gone by before he was even allowed to leave his room, still suffering from headaches and aphasia and grudgingly enduring physical therapy all the while.

Harry, back then, had thought Eggsy fully aware of his condition but simply too busy to swan off to America, while Merlin hoarded the truth tightly to his chest in an effort to spare the young man further heartbreak, should Harry's delicate condition deteriorate. The instant he had discovered the truth, about two months before he finally made his return to Savile Row, Harry had begun an insistent campaign to Merlin to let him go home and sort the mess out for himself.

It had taken those two months before Harry was cleared for travel yet again, but by then the damage had long since been done.

Whenever Eggsy would storm off in a pique of rage and find himself on that bloody park bench, Harry would inevitably join him, more often than not, and take advantage of Eggsy's stony silence to explain the best he could.

It was in those mostly one sided conversations that Harry - the real Harry, not the amalgamation of all of Eggsy's Harry fantasies that sauntered about inside his head - began to show a side of himself that Eggsy had never seen before. Apologies had faded into long winded musings about the absurdity of his own life; his upbringing in a grandiose home just outside of Surrey, where he had been much loved but fairly lonely - his hunting dog, Amadeus, who feared wild game to the point of being what Harry suspected was England's poorest hunting dog, his only constant companion. The eccentricity of his extended family and all of their bizarre Christmas traditions. The way that Harry had briefly wished, during a dark spot in the early eighties he mostly refuses to speak of, to be a rock and roll musician.

His diatribes had frustrated Eggsy to no end, because he found them painfully endearing and sweet in a time when he wanted nothing more than to be furious at Harry and Merlin and stay that way forever. Still, no matter how much it irritated him to do so, he couldn’t help but enjoy these little insights and the way that they allowed him to get to know Harry in a way he hadn’t had the chance to, before.

That’s not to say that he was quick to forgive Harry; there was reason, after all, for Harry’s open disdain for that particular meeting spot. There were countless weeks of arguing and shouting and even grovelling before the pain waned enough for Eggsy to let go of his noxious anger and extend a tentative forgiveness.

Merlin’s deception had taken decidedly longer for him to stomach.

It had been almost impossible for him to accept when Roxy forgave the man in question after what seemed to be hardly any time at all.

He’d managed to ask her, a few months back from the present day, how it was she had managed to do so.

She had shrugged at him and sighed through her nose. “The same reasons you forgave Harry, I suppose,” she’d said, brushing the hair out of her face and rolling her eyes at his bewildered expression. “Because I love him.”

“I don’t love Harry,” Eggsy had replied, dumbfounded.

Roxy, for her part, had laughed right into his face. “Oh, _please_ ,” she chuckled, but the amusement had bled out of her face at the continued consternation on his own. “Oh, my God,” she’d whispered faintly, and slumped against the railing of the manor’s terrace. “You have no idea, do you?” She’d shook her head, apparently disgusted with him. _“Men.”_

“What’s happening?” Eggsy’d asked, feeling clueless and helpless and a lot of other unfortunate ‘-less’ words.

“You’ll figure it out eventually,” she’d assured him with a pat on the arm. “But, look, do me a favour and not do anything about it until at least June. We’ve all got a bit of a wager going on, and I’d love a new pair of Louboutins.”

“I’m not in love with Harry,” Eggsy had insisted, stupefied.

Three hours later, after a long look inwards and backwards at his interactions with Harry, he’d phoned her up in a panic. “I’m in love with Harry,” he’d blurted as soon as the other line had picked up. “Oh, fucking _shit_ , what the fuck do I do?”

There’d been a brief silence on the other end before Merlin had said, slowly, “I’ll put Roxy on the phone then, shall I?” and Eggsy had proceeded to bang his head against the wall until his mom came into his bedroom and made him stop.

So, yeah.

Stupidest thing he’s ever done.

 

 

ooo

 

 

Scratch that - _this_ might be the stupidest thing he’s ever done.

“You want us to _what_?” Eggsy asks, staring at Merlin like he’s never seen the man before in his entire life. When he looks to his right, he’s gratified to see that Roxy is looking at him with the same sort of disbelief.

Merlin sighs, and Harry’s shoulders tense even further. He’s hardly moved from his spot staring out the window in his office, hands furled together in a tight knot behind his back.

“The retreat centre where you’re meant to be going undercover requires a copy of a wedding video, if any such thing is indicated to exist in the application that is sent into them. Something about reminding couples of the happier times, or some tosh like that. I wasn’t aware of this particular stipulation, or I wouldn’t have checked that box off in the positive when I was filling out their frankly offensively inane questionnaire, but now they’re being fucking tenacious about it and refuse to let up until they’ve received the tape in question.”

“You want us,” Eggsy says, slumping forward in his seat until he can rub his fingers across his temples. “To have a wedding.”

“You and Roxy?” Merlin asks. “Not a fucking chance in the world. But David and Laura Sterling? Absolutely. In fact you’ll find that I’m insisting on it.”

“You’re just gonna stand there and let this happen?” Eggsy demands incredulously, gesturing towards Harry even though the man has no hope of seeing it, what with not having looked at Eggsy _once_ since he came into the office.

Harry turns slightly at that, though, and looks at Eggsy through only the furthest corner of his eye. “Needs must,” he says, but his voice is thin and wavers with an unhappiness that would perhaps be unnoticable to someone not so enamoured with the man. Harry turns away to the window again, but his fingers flex.

Eggsy scoffs and pushes himself out of the armchair, shoving his hands back into the front pocket of his hoodie - why are they always dropping these things into his lap on his days off? - and shuffles towards the door.

“Where are you going?” Roxy asks him, coming to her feet and quickly crossing to his side. She shuts the door once they’re out in the hallway after one last furtive glance into the room, and curls her fingers around his forearm and gives him a reassuring squeeze. “Is everything alright, Eggsy?” she inquires quietly, face tipped up and coloured with concern.

He shrugs, but makes no move to step away despite his irritation and discomfort. “This whole thing is fuckin’ nuts, Rox,” he murmurs, shaking his head. “It was all right when it were just...photoshop and forgeries, y’know? A fucking _wedding video_. And, I know it ain’t real,” he reassures her. “It ain’t my name on the certificate, I get it, but weddings…” He trails off.

“Cold feet already?” Roxy teases gently, and starts leading him down the hall towards a set of doors that lead to one of the manor’s many balconies.

Eggsy takes a deep, grateful inhale of the fresh air that meets them as they step through the glass doors. “It’s stupid,” he admits. He leans his head over to the side when Roxy tips her temple into his shoulder, and rests his cheek atop the crown of her head. “I s’pose I’m just a fucking sap, but I always thought that the day I’d put on a penguin suit of me own and get that ring…”

“That it would be real,” Roxy finishes for him, sounding wistful and almost sad. Eggsy pulls his arm out of her grasp so that he can drape it around her shoulders.

“Real,” he agrees, and when he closes his eyes, he does his best not to think about the tall, graceful figure he’s started to imagine at the other end of the aisle.

 

 

ooo

 

 

Just when Eggsy thinks that the world can’t possibly take the piss anymore than it already has, _someone_ decides that it would be a brilliant idea if every available Kingsman agent gets in on the farce. “Believability,” is the claimed reason behind this literal nightmare. “What’s a wedding without guests?”

It’s actually not a bad idea, loathe as Eggsy is to admit it, but it does have the undesired side effect of every fucking person that crosses his path making snide little jabs about “the missus.” Amelia keeps texting him links to various Pinterest boards, to the point where he’s had to get Merlin to set up a fucking filter system just to keep them out of his inbox. Percival goes through the effort of giving Eggsy a shovel talk about his sister that’s half-stern, half-amused. Bors, whom Eggsy maintains is a bit of a cunt on his best day, sends him relentless emails with badly photoshopped pictures of Eggsy in wedding gowns.

It’s bothering Roxy just as much as it irritates Eggsy, but not even the snottiest of comments infuriate him quite as much as the rotten pique into which Harry’s settled himself quite firmly.

Since the revelation of the need for a staged wedding video, Harry has been an outright _menace._ He's quick to succumb to a strop, his temper lives on a thin precipice where any possible combination of words can send him over, and do so with increasing frequency.

Not to mention that he’s taken up the habit of staring at Eggsy with an indecipherable look on his face, eyes flinty and mouth compressed into a tight line, all while refusing to actually fucking talk to Eggsy like any kind of decent arsehole would. That stupid, bloody look finds its way towards Eggsy when he’s done nothing more than have the audacity to show up and breathe the same air as Harry, and it is _driving him round the fucking bend._

He would chalk it all up to his overactive imagination, mixing with his own embarrassing sensitivity on the idea of this fake wedding, if it weren’t for the startled and reproving glances that he catches Roxy shooting Harry’s way from time to time, or how there have been several occasions where he’s caught Merlin glaring at his own best friend with a sour look and then found them in a heated, whispering argument not twenty minutes later. They both clam up immediately whenever Eggsy catches them at it, Merlin usually striding away with a pointed look back at Harry while the other man keeps his own gaze firmly on his shoes before pivoting and striding away without a word.

Eggsy thinks of Harry’s soft plea at the park bench, asking for a bit of patience and a bit more time, and laughs bitterly to himself. He supposes that whatever it was Harry had needed working through has been resolved, and Eggsy is poorer for it.

He can’t think on it too long, or else he feels the hot sting of disappointment gathering in the corners of his eyes. It’s only...he’d had such _hope_. Such stupid, optimistic hope that whatever Harry had meant by chasing him down and entreating for a touch of understanding had meant that maybe - just _maybe_ \- there had been a sliver of a chance at Eggsy’s feelings being returned.

Such a thing seems comically out of reach these days, what with Harry prowling about HQ and the manor and acting as though Eggsy is the bane of his existence.

He used to be able to shed the strain of life within Kingsman whenever he went home, finding comfort in a cup of tea and one of his mum’s home cooked meals, but even that pleasure has been hard to come by when he’s painfully aware of the fact that Harry lives only three doors down. Given that it’s approaching the balmy, mild weather of summer, he and his mum have taken to having tea on the small terrace on their second floor, giving Eggsy a bird's eye view of Harry whenever he arrives home.

His mum is quick to notice how Eggsy’s humour sours after laying eyes upon the man in question, and bless her if she doesn’t do her best to cheer him back up out of his black mood. She’s long since learned not to ask for details about what goes on at work, if only because it gives her undue anxiety and stress whenever she does, but she tips herself into Eggsy’s side and nuzzles her cheek against his shoulder, offering him comfort in any way she can.

It’s a soothing balm for the growing anger and sadness that are hollowing out Eggsy’s bones, but not quite enough to lull the pain of Harry’s apparent abhorrence.

Eggsy sighs from his place on the stone terrace at the manor, propped up on his elbows atop the rough, low-sitting wall, and twists the unfamiliar white-gold hoop that encircles his left finger. Merlin had presented him with the ring that morning upon Eggsy’s arrival to the estate, and all of his well meaning intentions to make use of Kingsman’s gymnastic facility and burn off some of his aggression, go completely out the window when the cold piece of metal is dropped into his palm.

He’d given Merlin a sickly smile and slipped it cautiously over his knuckles, flexing his hand when it had settled, snug and perfectly fitted, at the base of his finger. “Thanks, bruv,” he’d muttered, and then had gotten the hell out of dodge.

His usual go-to spot for an existential crisis is out of the question, given that it’s damn near on the other side of London, so he’d fled for the terrace and settled there for his current spout of misery.

He feels woefully out of place, wrong in his own skin, in a way he hasn’t done for over a year and a half now. Standing outside a house that would rival Pemberley for all its pomp, dressed in his gymming clothes and watching the newest round of Kingsman proposals do their laps in the distance, and twirling a wedding band that spoke of nothing but false pretense between his fingers...there’s a distinct feeling of unhappiness about him, like there’s nowhere he truly belongs.

The faint sound of a door opening behind him breaks the relative silence of his musings, and it’s only when he hears the click of heels on stone does he chance a look backwards.

It’s Roxy, thank fuck, and she looks absolutely bloody _stunning._ Eggsy might be arse over tits in love with Harry, but he still finds the breath knocked out of him at the sight of her clad in a wedding gown.

“Wow,” he says softly, giving her a long once over. “Rox, you...you look beautiful.”

She flushes happily and brushes her hair out of her face, ducking her head in an uncharacteristic show of shyness. “You like it?” she asks, peeking up at him. “It’s only the first fitting, there are all these god awful clamps holding it together in the back - ”

“Love it,” he interrupts with honesty, turning around so he can lean his elbows backwards onto the wall and get a better look at her. “You look like a fucking princess.”

She preens at that, smoothing her hands carefully down the skirt of the dress, and he can see the distant gleam and sparkle of a set of rings on her finger when she does so.

The gown itself is white, but just enough off the colour that it isn’t blinding, with a bottom that flares out from her waist and one of those tops that curves over her breasts before dipping in the middle - a sweetheart, he thinks he’s heard his mum call it - and her shoulders and arms are encased in a thin layer of fabric that’s mostly sheer and dotted over with pearls and embroidered flowers. They speckle their way across her chest and curl over her shoulders and biceps, the embellishments becoming more sparse as the sleeves travel down towards her hands. The same delicate pattern is found all over the bodice and the skirt, growing larger towards the bottom but looking no less elegant for it.

“It’s Elie Saab,” she informs him, and there’s a wistful note in her voice that, combined with the childlike way she swishes the skirt atop her feet, makes Eggsy’s heart ache, and does well to remind him that he isn’t the only one involved in this sham.

“I don’t know what the fuck that means,” he replies cheerfully, grinning when she huffs. “Jesus, Roxy. What’d Merlin have to say when he saw you? I bet he shit himself.”

The happy little smile on her face falters briefly. “He...he hasn’t seen it, yet. Left the room once Amelia brought out the dress bag and never came back.” She crosses one arm over her stomach, hand curling around the elbow of her other arm, and looks so baldly self-conscious that it hurts a bit to look at her, gorgeous as she may be. When he gestures for her to come join him at his spot by the wall, she doesn’t hesitate to cross to him.

“I s’pose it’s understandable, innit?” he asks, draping his left arm around her shoulders and giving her a careful squeeze. One of the pearls scrapes against the wedding ring around his finger. “Must be hard, seein’ your lass get all dolled up and ready to walk down the aisle to another, much fitter bloke.” She elbows him in the side, not hard enough to really hurt but hard enough to smart and make him wheeze. “All ‘m saying,” he finishes roughly, rubbing at the spot she’d just bumped. “Is that this can’t be easy on him, yeah? He loves you, don’t he? Even someone with bollocks big as Merlin’s has gotta be a bit ticked at seein’ you in a wedding dress for someone else.” He sighs and squeezes the arm around her shoulders again. “Least you know why he’s actin’ off. Harry’s been a fucking prick the past week, and I can’t fucking figure it out.”

Roxy says nothing in response, and when Eggsy tilts his head to get a look at her, he finds her staring up at him with a look of morbid astonishment. He frowns. “What?”

“Oh, my God,” she says, faint and wondering. “All this time, I’ve thought you were simply being impatient, but that’s not it, is it? You’re just... _thick._ ”

“Oi!”

She shakes her head and pats him on the chest with her left hand, shiny rings clinking against the metal zip of his jacket. “The two of you need more help than I thought.”

Eggsy frowns even harder, but as he’s opening his mouth to ask her what, exactly, the fuck she’s on about, there’s the gentle scrape and woosh of the terrace doors being pushed open once again. Merlin and Harry step out onto the landing, conversing lowly as they do so, and come to abrupt halt when they realise Eggsy and Roxy are standing there in front of them.

Merlin’s face does something miraculous once he catches sight of Roxy, his eyebrows shooting off into his forehead and his mouth dropping open. The clipboard that he always keeps clutched so tightly to his chest slips out of slack fingers and clatters noisily to the stone beneath his feet.

“My God,” he whispers, and takes a jerking two steps forward. “You look...you look…”

“Ridiculous,” Roxy says, with a firm bravado ruined only by the way that Eggsy can feel her trembling against him. “I know.”

“No,” Merlin asserts quickly, darting forward another step like his body’s taken the motion without his explicit consent. “You’re the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen.”

Eggsy, whose heart feels damn well near to bursting with affection for Roxy even on their worst days, feels like it might actually break his ribs with the rush of happiness he feels as her face brightens into something joyous and tentatively hopeful.

Then he glances off at Harry, and his heart shrivels back into a pruney mess almost just as fast.

Harry’s got the sort of thundercloud look on his face that he reserves for only the most incompetent of fuck-ups, face drawn down so severely that even his neck looks disapproving. Every centimetre of his body looks so tightly strung that even the slightest breeze will cause him to snap, and all they’ll be left with of their Arthur is the fraying pieces of a broody and petulant fifty-three year old man. He’s glaring at Eggsy’s hand on Roxy’s shoulder with such a blatant expression of distaste that Eggsy’s surprised he doesn’t catch on fire with the force of it.

It’s so striking a contrast to the soppy, adoring looks currently being exchanged between Roxy and Merlin, that Eggsy has quite abruptly and completely Had Enough.

“What the fuck is your problem, eh?” he snaps at Harry, voice rattling harshly between the four of them. Beneath his arm, Roxy startles, and even Merlin looks caught off guard by the demand.

Harry blinks like he’s been startled out of a stupor. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said,” Eggsy snarls, pulling his arm off from around Roxy and starting forward. She clutches at him as he goes, making half-finished pleas for him not to start, and so he shrugs her off and strides to the space right in front of Harry, hands balled tightly by his sides. “What the _fuck_ is your problem?”

His arms fly up, palms outstretched, and he shoves them into Harry’s chest so hard that the man actually stumbles back.

“Eggsy,” Roxy tries again, voice edged with horror.

“No,” he shouts, not necessarily at her, but at the situation as a whole. “No, you know what? I’m done. I am fucking _done_ pretending to be all right with him treating me like a piece of shit he scraped off the bottom of his shoe.” Harry flinches back at this, looking for all the world like he’s genuinely startled and upset by the comparison, one hand rubbing at the spot where Eggsy had pushed him, and that only serves to rile Eggsy up even further. All his anger and hurt, left simmering beneath the surface for endless weeks, has finally given in to the laws of nature and started to boil over.

“What, you think I haven’t noticed?” Eggsy barks out an ugly laugh. “The past week - no, the past _three fucking months_ \- I’ve been lucky if the most I could get outta you was a halfway decent smile. If you was only me boss, fine. That’s fine, I couldn’t give a fuck. But I thought that we was _friends_ , Harry. I thought that we were - ” He catches himself on the edge of a confession and draws himself back from that ledge with a painful swallow. “But now I just ain’t worth the time of day, and I don’t know what the fuck I’ve done to make you hate me like this.”

It’s only when he’s forced to blink does he realise that his vision has gone blurry with the hot bite of angry tears. They slip down his face and sting against the overheated skin of his cheeks, mottled with his rage and hurt.

Harry, for his part, looks ashen. “Eggsy,” he says, and reaches forward.

Eggsy lurches back, batting the hand away before he even realises he’s doing it. “Don't,” he bites out, breath trembling out harshly through his nose. “Don’t you fucking touch me.”

A silence, heavy with unease and tension, settles precariously over the four of them. Eggsy can’t bring himself to look away from Harry’s stricken expression, nauseated as it makes him feel, and can hardly hear anything over the sound of his own harsh breathing and the tripping, thunderous rhythm of his heart. He lifts his forearm to his face and scrubs the material of his jacket over his mouth, under his nose, before wiping desperately at the tears that are still trickling down his face.

“I’m done,” he whispers, and his voice is rasping and clogged and horrible. His heart feels simultaneously stuck in his throat and somewhere down in his feet, slowly being crushed between Harry’s shoes and the stone beneath them. “You get me? I am fucking _done_. Whatever shit it was you needed working out, you can do it on your own. I ain’t waiting anymore.”

He shoulders past Harry at that, slamming into him with more force than necessarily needed to get by, and barges through the french doors and back into the manor’s expansive halls.

Behind him, there are no shouting voices or entreaties for him to come back. There aren’t any footsteps behind him, rushing to catch up. He can’t figure out whether or not their absence is a relief.

He waits until he’s within the confines of the bullet train, safe and solitary, before he falls apart and sobs into his knees.

 

 

ooo

 

 

When he gets home, after his miserable ride from the manor to HQ and a very quiet taxi ride with Ector to Stanhope Mews, Eggsy's mum takes one look at his swollen and miserable face when he sets foot inside the door, and promptly ushers him into the kitchen for a mug of peppermint tea. Gwaine, who had been perched next to his mum on their front room sofa, gathers his things and leaves with a kiss to Michelle's cheek and a sympathetic squeeze to Eggsy's shoulder.

“What's happened, babe?” she asks him once the kettle is on. Eggsy leans into her hand when she pushes his hair off of his forehead, and listens to the comforting whine of the electric pot heating up.

“Harry - ” is all he manages to get out before the painful bristle of tears starts up again behind his eyes, and he buries his face into the crook of his arm.

His mum says nothing, only sighs a little and then kisses him on the crown of his head. “I’ll get the McVitie’s out,” she promises, and after a moment where he hears nothing but the sound of cabinet doors opening and closing and the quiet crinkle of plastic, she nudges the side of his head with the pack of biscuits. He lifts his head off of the table and pulls one from the packet, and gives the digestive a grateful nibble.

“There, now,” she soothes, running a hand across his shoulders and down his back. “Why don’t you tell Mum what Harry’s done this time, eh?” The space between her eyebrows wrinkles with sudden concern. “He hasn’t...died, has he? Again, I mean.”

“No,” Eggsy sighs, snapping the biscuit in half with his hands. “Nothing as bad as all that.”

The two of them sit there at the small kitchen table, and Eggsy tells his mum as much of the story as he can manage without giving away too many of Kingsman’s classified secrets. As they huddle together and she lets him rant and rave, the sun slowly dips down in the sky outside their window, the cheery afternoon slipping into the subdued glow of an impending dusk. They’re only interrupted twice - once when the kettle goes off, and again when Daisy wakes from her nap and starts chattering over the baby monitor - but Eggsy manages to finish the story.

At the end of it, his mum gives him a long and speculative look before lifting her shoulder in a helpless, one armed shrug. “I can’t tell you what to do, babe,” she informs him, brushing biscuit crumbs from the front of Daisy’s shirt. “Who’d’ve thought we’d see the day your love life was more a mess than mine?” she teases, nudging at him with her elbow. He manages a weak chuckle, and her smile dims.

“Sometimes, Eggsy,” she murmurs, sombre. “The best we can do is try all that we can to get through to someone. But some people, babe, you ain’t gonna be able to get to. And then…” She shrugs again. “Maybe the best thing for you is to walk away.”

“I can’t leave Kingsman,” he protests, feeling sick at the thought of it. He can’t imagine what would become of the fragile happiness of his family if he were to take that source of income away - where they would wind up within a couple of months.

“Not...not like that,” she assures him. “Maybe a holiday, though - a real holiday, til you can get your head on straight.”

“Maybe,” he acquiesces, fiddling with the zip on his jacket. His heart isn’t in it. He feels overly hot, all of a sudden, so he pulls his coat over the top of his head, leaving him clad only in his track pants and a shirt he stole from Harry’s house, back when he truly believed the man dead

A knock sounds at the door, turning both their heads towards the front of the house. His mum picks up her mobile and frowns at the screen. “That can’t be Rhys already,” she mutters, thumb dancing across the mobile. “Unless he ordered the take away before telling me about it.”

“I’ll get it,” Eggsy assures her. He stands, prodding Daisy in the belly as he does just so he can hear her squealing laughter, and stretches his legs for a moment before shuffling slowly towards the front door.

“That were fast,” he says as he pulls the door open - or rather, starts to say, because the words die a swift death on the back of his tongue when the door hinges open and it’s Harry standing on the other side.

“What do you want,” Eggsy demands softly, fingers clenching around the doorknob with a renewed anger.

“A chance to talk,” comes Harry’s equally soft response, though he sounds more docile and placating, and if his intent with that tone was to make Eggsy’s hackles rise up even further, then it’s a job bloody well done.

“Nothing’s ever that simple with you, Harry,” Eggsy says after a short but scornful laugh. The vindictive thrill he feels when Harry winces can’t seem to smother the guilt he feels at saying something so rotten, and so it’s with an aggravated expulsion of air that he steps onto his front steps and closes the door behind him. Eggsy crosses his arms over his chest, suddenly aware of the faded RAMC coat of arms plastered across the shirt he’s wearing. _Harry’s_ shirt.

“All right then,” he mumbles, and waves his left hand at Harry. “Talk.”

But Harry’s gone all rigid again, staring at Eggsy with a venom that’s a harsh turn from his previous imploring gaze. That’s not quite right, though, Eggsy realises as he follows Harry’s pointed stare to where his left hand is cupped against his right elbow. He’s not staring at _Eggsy_.

He’s staring at Eggsy’s hand.

“Jesus Christ, Harry,” Eggsy snaps, scrubbing the offending limb in question across his face. “Can we fucking get on with it already?”

“The ring,” Harry blurts out, then purses his lips together unhappily, as though he didn’t mean to say anything at all. He actually fidgets, shifting on his feet, as he extends his own palm upwards. “May I?”

Eggsy looks down at his hand again and splays his fingers wide, and it’s only in that moment that he realises he’d left the manor with the wedding band still firmly encircled around his finger. “Oh,” he says dumbly, and twists the ring about his finger yet again. Harry’s look darkens further - he must really be concerned about Eggsy scuffing up the ring. They’re no doubt bound to return it once it’s found its use. “Yeah.”

He pulls off the thin, gleaming circle of gold and runs his fingers over it one last time, before depositing it into Harry’s outstretched hand.

“Thank you,” Harry manages, still sounding stilted and compressed, and bounces the ring against his palm three times.

Then, abruptly, he pivots and hurls it down the Mews, hard as he can manage.

Eggsy watches with a detached sense of bewilderment as the ring flies down the street, little more than a glimmer of metal beneath the dimly lit lamp posts and the still-setting sun, and clatters to the pavement with a faint tinkle, landing somewhere that Eggsy can’t even begin to find with his naked eyes.

Harry turns back to him and straightens out his suit, looking much less constipated and almost even _pleased_ with himself.

“What,” Eggsy breathes. “The bloody fuck. Was that?!” He bustles past Harry, walking in the direction the ring had been thrown, scouring the pavement the best he can as he goes, in case it ricocheted and bounced back towards the house. “Are you out of your fucking mind?!”

“On the contrary,” Harry calls out from behind him, sounding cool as a cucumber. “I feel remarkably clear headed.”

“You are im-fucking-possible!” Eggsy shrieks back at him over his shoulder, and is too livid to be embarrassed at the way his voice bounces back at him, shrill and tinny. “I swear to shit, Harry, I get that you want nothing to do with me - ”

“Eggsy, no, that’s not - ” Harry tries, and Eggsy feels his fingertips brush against his shoulder blade. He ducks away from the movement, swatting his hand sightlessly behind him.

“ - but now Merlin is gonna have me arse over this! Why’d you have to go and throw the fucking ring?”

“BECAUSE IT WASN’T MINE!” Harry roars into the street, voice echoing back in the silence.

Eggsy stops in his tracks. The busy hum of London mutes itself in the wake of this confession. The world stops turning. Eggsy can’t breathe.

He turns slowly, so slowly, on his heel until he’s got his right shoulder pointed towards Harry, and he’s looking at the other man over the slope of it. The way his head is turned means that he can feel the pounding start-stop of his blood in his veins. Something cold is knotting up his stomach, and it might be either dread or hope - he can barely fucking tell.

“What?” he manages, voice choking up.

Harry shoves his hands into his trouser pockets and takes a series of long, shaking breaths in through his nose. “Have you any idea,” he spits out eventually, drawing his shoulders back and spreading his feet apart until he’s standing tall and proud and looking for all the world like he’s going into battle. “What it’s like to watch you go about, planning a wedding to someone else? To listen to the endless tedium of questions about decorations and ceremony rites and what sort of gown the bride will be wearing?”

“It was your idea!” Eggsy cries out, throwing his hands into the air.

“Don’t you think I know that?” Harry snaps. “Bloody hell, Eggsy, of course I know I’m not being _rational_. That doesn’t mean it didn’t drive me absolutely, raving mad to see you going about all this...this wedding malarky. It doesn’t matter if I knew it wasn’t real. Do you know what it did to me? What it’s like to see you wear a ring that _isn’t mine?_ ”

Eggsy’s hallucinating. He’s finally done it - gone off the ledge and sunk so deeply into his ridiculous infatuation with Harry that he’s starting going mad, because there’s no other possible explanation for what it is that he’s hearing right now. “What?” he says again, because all cognitive ability has left him.

Harry takes a step forward. “Do you recall the incident a few months ago,” he begins. “With the Hungarians?”

“A bit hard not to,” Eggsy retorts, still sounding strangled. “What with the light torture ‘n’ all that.”

“Precisely,” Harry hisses. “Seventy-two hours where you were completely unaccounted for, your comms down and your glasses broken, with no way for us to track you down and no possible way for me to know if you were alive or if...or if…” Harry trails off and hangs his head, the line of his shoulders unbearably tense and painful to look at. “I was terrified,” he admits. “Of losing you so soon after it seemed I had only just found you once more. And, Christ, I put you through a _year_ of that feeling. How you were even able to look at me again, much less forgive me...and I said all of those awful things to you once I knew you were safe, because I was so _furious_ with you for scaring me so horribly.”

Harry takes another two steps forward, pulling one hand from his pocket and waving it around in the air between them. “This... _you_. All of it is brand new territory for me, Eggsy. I’ve never felt like this before, and I’m fifty-three years old. I’m twice your age. You deserve so much better than an old man like me.”

Eggsy starts forward at that, stumbling closer to Harry, feet made dumb by the hope (and it _was_ hope) that made them feel stupidly light. “I don’t want better,” he insists. “And, fuck that, you’re the best, Harry. I don’t want no one else,” he confesses, and reaches out to cautiously curl his fingers into the lapel of Harry’s suit jacket. “I just want you.”

“Good,” Harry sibilates, and abruptly reaches out to fist the fingers of one hand into the back of Eggsy’s head, and clamps the other down at the inward dip of Eggsy’s waist. He gives a hard tug, and Eggsy’s body falls forward until they’re pressed together, from knees to chests. “Because I’ll be damned if I let anyone else have you.”

He swoops down, and claims Eggsy’s mouth for his own.

Eggsy clings to him with a whimper, hands curling over the back of Harry’s neck and melting into his strong embrace. He licks across the seam of Harry’s mouth just as Harry drops his hand to Eggsy’s hip so that he can sweep his palm up beneath the thin fabric of his own shirt, calloused hand warm against Eggsy’s skin. Harry groans into his mouth before opening his own and dipping his tongue in to brush against Eggsy’s.

He wonders, inanely, if he tastes of peppermint tea and chocolate digestives. Then Harry’s hand slips down the curve of his spine, tantalisingly close to his arse, and Eggsy finds himself hard pressed to give a fuck about anything except the curve of Harry’s body against his own.

Eggsy runs his hands across the sides of Harry’s neck, brushing his fingers into the space between skin and starchy collar, and wrenches his mouth away with a gasp. Harry merely takes it as an opportunity to smear messy, biting kisses down the column of Eggsy’s neck, nosing into the divot of his collarbone and worrying the delicate flesh there between his teeth.

“We should,” Eggsy breathes, still clutching Harry to him. “Inside?”

“Why?” Harry growls against him, using the hand at the small of Eggsy’s back to haul him closer so that Harry can grind his erection more firmly against Eggsy’s belly. “I want the whole world to see that you’re mine.”

Which is so scorchingly hot that Eggsy’s knees go weak and a familiar burn starts to build in his gut, reaffirming his very valid point of: “Inside,” he reiterates, shoving Harry back just enough that their foreheads knock together. “Unless you want the whole world to see what I look like when I come.”

Harry’s face does a series of complicated movements that Eggsy can’t even begin to parse out, ranging from ‘lust’ to ‘consideration’ to ‘possessive fury’ to ‘frustration’ and back to ‘lust’ again, before he acquiesces with a nod. “Inside,” he agrees, but follows it up with another searing, deep kiss.

The two of them have to physically wrench themselves apart in order to make it any farther than a couple of feet at a time in their stumbling walk to Harry’s doorstep. In those moments, Eggsy’s certain that the only thing keeping him from melting into a lusty puddle on the pavement is the way that Harry keeps a tightly wound arm about his waist.

There’s a moment where Harry fumbles with the keys, swearing as he drops them onto his front step because his fingers are badly shaking, and Eggsy is so enormously buoyed by his love for this man that he can’t stop the breathless giggle that erupts from deep within.

Harry tries and fails to give him a stern look for it, but even if he had succeeded, the effect would have be ruined by the way he cups Eggsy’s cheek and kisses him, soft and tender.

“I love you,” Eggsy confesses into the humid space between their mouths, looking up at Harry with a bright, stunned gaze. “Fuck, I love you so much.”

Harry’s eyes go wide and then hooded, and he pulls Eggsy more tightly into his embrace as he turns the key inside the lock. “I love you,” he growls back, ushering Eggsy into his home once the door has opened. He rotates quickly once they’re both inside, uses both of their bodies to push the door shut, and twists the locks into place. He presses Eggsy up against the door, inserting one long and lean-muscled thigh between both of Eggsy’s own, and dives in for yet another deep, longing kiss.

Eggsy drapes his arms around Harry’s shoulders and grinds upwards into him, and sends up a prayer of thanks to the track pants gods for making the clothing flexible enough that he can hitch his knee up around Harry’s waist with no fear of tearing fabric. Harry moans into his mouth and bites at his bottom lip before running his tongue along the stinging flesh and sucking the plump of it gently between his teeth.

His keys drop to the floor with a rattle and thump. Both of them are too far gone to care.

Eggsy drags his hands across Harry’s neck and down his chest until he can slip the buttons of his jacket through their holes. He’s fervently glad that today is one of the days where Harry has forgone a waistcoat (he can’t imagine the nightmare of dealing with all those buttons) and he can concentrate instead on shoving the jacket off of his shoulders and getting to work on loosening up his tie.

There’s a minor scuffle when Eggsy drops his leg and they both start to toe off their shoes at the same time, but once they’re down to their socks it’s easy enough to shrug off the awkward stumbling and sink into each other’s embrace once more.

Harry’s hands spread themselves across the rounded flesh of Eggsy’s arse, greedy over the curve of it before settling in at the backs of his thighs. He gives a tug and Eggsy helps by jumping up, until he’s got his ankles crossed at the small of Harry’s back and the man’s waist nestled in the V of his legs.

“Fuck,” Harry groans, pushing Eggsy back up against the door and rocking his hips forward. “Do you have idea idea at all what you do to me?”

“Feeling’s mutual, bruv,” Eggsy assures him on a whine, rock hard cock rubbing against the surprisingly solid plane of Harry’s stomach. “Fuck, Harry, take me to bed, man.”

“Abso-fucking-lutely,” Harry agrees, and steps away from the door. He only manages it about halfway to the stairs before he stops with a wince. “Would you mind terribly if you walked the stairs on your own?” he asks Eggsy, breathing hard, in between kisses. “I’m afraid my back would protest it greatly if I tried to carry you.”

“No worries,” Eggsy breathes against his lips, and hops down. Once his feet are firmly on the ground, he takes advantage of their separation to quickly shuck his tee and shove his pants and trousers down to his ankles. “Think you’re still young enough to catch me, old man?”

He gives a cheeky, excited grin, then turns around and bolts up the stairs, headed for the master bedroom. He can hear Harry swearing behind him as he gets a load of Eggsy’s arse, jiggling slightly as he scurries up the steps, and the muted thump of his socked feet rushing to catch up fills Eggsy with a giddy adrenaline that he hasn’t felt in ages.

He manages to make it to the doorway of Harry’s bedroom before Harry snags him around the waist, still wearing his own trousers but no less eager to press his erection against the small of Eggsy’s back as he walks them forward to the bed. Eggsy’s knees bump into the bedspread, and then Harry’s throwing him onto the covers, face down, and crawling up behind him.

He urges Eggsy up onto all fours and plants his hands on the generous swell of Eggsy’s bum, pushing apart the cheeks and giving an appraising look to the clenching pucker of his hole, the rosy drop of his bollocks, and the heavy swell of his cock between his thighs. “Gorgeous,” Harry whispers, and leans forward to bite at Eggsy’s arse. “So bloody gorgeous, and all _mine_.”

“Yeah,” Eggsy grunts, rocking back on his heels, trying to tantalise Harry into putting his mouth to work. He feels a bit ridiculous, arse up and gagging for it while he’s still wearing his stupid socks, but at the same time he can’t find it within himself to give less of a shit. He’s got bigger concerns at the moment, all of them involving getting a part of Harry inside of him as soon as humanly possible. “Fuck yeah, all yours, Harry. Oh, shit, _please_ , want you so fucking much.”

“You have me,” Harry promises, and presses his tongue into the sensitive stretch of flesh between cock and arse. Eggsy keens lowly and trembles, which is nothing compared to the way he positively liquefies when Harry’s tongue licks, flat and broad, against his hole.

“Oh, my God,” he mutters to himself, dropping his head into his hands and scraping his fingernails against his scalp. “Oh God, oh God, oh, fucking - fuck!”

Harry, who at this point is happily sucking Eggsy’s sack into his mouth, gives a hum of agreement and runs his own nails sharply across the backs of Eggsy’s thighs. Eggsy drops his face into his elbow with a whimper and tries his hardest not to collapse before they’ve even gotten to the really good stuff.

Harry takes mercy on him briefly and abandons his balls in favour of licking a wet path up the taint and giving small, flickering licks to his hole that feel curiously more intimate than if he’d shoved his whole tongue inside in one go. He readjusts his grip on Eggsy’s bum, thumbs digging into the crease, and then buries his face so firmly into Eggsy that his nose digs into his tailbone. He laves at the puckered muscle, making sure to get it nice and sloppily wet before he pulls back just far enough to slip his finger inside, up to the first knuckle.

Eggsy keens his encouragement, rocking back so that Harry has no choice but to press his finger in even further, all the way inside. He darts back in, tonguing across where Eggsy is stretched so beautiful around him, and starts to gently thrust in and out, in time with Eggsy’s undulations.

Harry, Eggsy very quickly learns, eats arse like he fights: barely restrained savagery, but every move calculated to get the maximum effect. He’s careful to get his own mouth wet enough that Eggsy’s arse feels deliciously slick and wet without being unpleasantly sloppy, crooking his finger gently each time he thrusts it fully inside and sure to run the flat of his tongue around the hole as he withdraws. His thumb, too, keeps caressing at the delicate, swollen space just behind his balls, nudging up occasionally to deliver a gorgeous little shock down Eggsy’s spine.

Eggsy is very poorly equipped to deal with this assault, and quickly devolves into a shivering, jellied mass of painful arousal.

“More,” he manages to rasp eventually, clenching down on Harry’s finger on the withdraw. “Another, Harry, I can - I can fucking take it.”

“Yes,” Harry growls, losing some of that control and pistoning his finger in and out, fast, for a couple of strokes. Eggsy’s thighs tremble.

Then, abruptly, all that delicious sensation is gone as Harry pulls away from him and lurches off the bed. “What?” Eggsy whines, high in the back of his throat. “No, man, get back here!” His hips are still rocking backwards into the phantom press of Harry’s tongue, and he has no choice but to reach down between his legs and twist a hand around his cock.

“Patience, Eggsy,” Harry preaches, but the desired effect is lost somewhere when his voice comes out ragged with lust. He’s switched on a lamp and is rummaging through his bedside table, so Eggsy keeps stroking himself and turns his head to watch.

Harry looks so lovely, hair mussed and slightly sweaty, his tie still looped around his neck but loose. He must have undone the first two buttons of his dress shirt while Eggsy couldn’t see him, but there’s the tantalising gleam of sweat that highlights the dip of his collarbone, and it makes Eggsy thrusts into his own hand with a whine.

Harry finds whatever it was he was looking for - lube and a condom, bless him - and crouches next to the bed. He runs a hand up Eggsy’s arm, across his shoulder and down his flank, eyes roving from his jerking fist to his slack-jawed face and back again. “You’re stunning,” he whispers fiercely, and darts in to press a kiss to Eggsy’s bicep.

“Please,” Eggsy begs him, spine arching in an effort not to come. “Harry, _please_.”

“I love the way you say my name,” Harry says conversationally, but there’s a wild gleam in his eyes. He pulls at the knot of his necktie, fabric slithering from its place beneath his collar, and tosses it carelessly onto the floor.

“Promise you’ll like it a lot better,” Eggsy grits out, grinding his forehead into the duvet, “when I shout it.”

Harry gives a full body shudder at that and fairly _throws_ the lube and condom down onto the bed, hitting the tensed muscle of Eggsy’s calf in the process. He clambers back onto the mattress, kneeling behind Eggsy, and the brush of his trouser material across the heated, sensitised flesh on the back of his thighs makes Eggsy choke.

Harry folds himself over Eggsy’s back, fingers in a bruising clench around his hips (and fuck, Eggsy hopes they leave a mark) and attaches himself to Eggsy’s neck with a low groan. He opens his mouth to press hot, laving kisses that are followed by the scraping of teeth, and pulls the delicate skin into his mouth so that he can worry at it. He sucks what Eggsy is sure to be a massive, lurid bruise into the juncture of his neck where it meets his shoulder, thrusting his erection into Eggsy’s arse as he does.

His mouth removes itself with a pop, Harry leaning back to survey his work. He gives a low hum of satisfaction, then nuzzles down into Eggsy’s shoulder blade. “You gorgeous, darling boy,” he praises. “You’re so good for me, aren’t you? All for me, Eggsy, you’re _mine_. I won’t let anyone else have you, dearest. I love you so very, very much, you’ve no idea. Promise me that you’re mine, you lovely, perfect boy - ”

“Fuck,” Eggsy gasps, and comes into his hand and all across the bedspread, shaking violently with the force of it. “ _Harry!_ ”

“Yes,” Harry encourages him raggedly, smearing the word into the space behind Eggsy’s ear as he continues to babble the other man’s name. “Oh, fucking hell, Eggsy, _yes_.”

Eggsy’s still shivering with the aftershocks and may even still be coming when Harry rears back far enough to flip him over, landing his back in a cleaner portion of the duvet. His legs are quivering and come-dumb, pliant and tense all at once, when Harry shoves his thighs up and apart and holds them there with one hand while the other fumbles with the bottle of lube.

A cold drip down his balls and across his arsehole shocks Eggsy enough out of his orgasmic stupor that he can open his eyes, only to clench them shut again when Harry’s finger finds its way inside once more. “Oh, shit,” he gurgles, hands convulsing and scratching lines against his abdomen.

It takes a bit of work, getting him to relax and loosen up enough for Harry to press a second finger in, but by the time he manages it Eggsy’s halfway hard again and chanting Harry’s name like it’s a prayer.

“You're doing so well,” Harry coos, crooking his fingers into the spongy gland of Eggsy's prostate. Eggsy's only response is to give a garbled, half swallowed swear, fingers clenching into the backs of his thighs where he's holding himself up. A pillow appeared beneath the small of his back at some point, alleviating a bit of the stress caused by holding himself this way for so long, and he's grateful for Harry's foresight. “Perfect, darling, just as I've always thought you would be.”

“Yeah?” Eggsy asks him, breathing hard. Harry brushes his fingers against his prostate again, and Eggsy bites into the jut of his own knee and keens around the mouthful of flesh and bone.

“I had such high hopes for you from the moment that we met,” Harry continues. He pushes a third finger into Eggsy, slow and so very careful, and grins rakishly at the guttural shout it earns him. “You've surpassed them all.”

“Fuck me,” Eggsy demands, cock fully hard now, smearing dribbles of pre-come against his belly. The steady burn of Harry's fingers, combined with the sweet cadence of his words, is almost too much to bear. “Harry, bruv, I fucking love you, but if you don't get your cock in me five fucking minutes ago, I will strangle you.”

“Please resist the urge,” Harry tells him, voice dry and teasing even as he pulls his fingers out of Eggsy and yanks at the button fly of his trousers. Christ, he's still fully fucking dressed, missing only his suit jacket, his tie, and his shoes. “Asphyxiation has never been a favourite of mine.”

He pours more lube over Eggsy's cock and down his balls, letting gravity do the work of carrying it to where Eggsy is stretched and needy, but hesitated when his fingers close in on the condom wrapper. “I wouldn't dare to presume,” he starts. Eggsy gets his meaning almost immediately.

“Fuck yeah,” he grunts, letting one hand drift down his leg so he can press two fingers of his own into his body. Harry inhales sharply. “Shit, yes, that sounds so fucking good. Want you to fuck me bare, Harry, want you to come inside me and - Jesus, you've got a pretty cock,” he slurs as Harry shoves his pants down his thighs and rucks up his shirt, giving Eggsy his first glance at it.

He's long, so beautifully long, and though he's not quite so thick as Eggsy, there's a delicious girth to him that leaves Eggsy looking forward to being sore for the next few days. He's stripping his hand over his cock, smearing a generous application of lube as he goes, and every time his hand passes on the shaft, his foreskin pulls back to reveal the plump head at the end of him. It's a pretty shade of mauve, fat and nearly painful, and Eggsy's caught between the greedy, empty clench of his arse and the mouthwatering urge to suck Harry down his throat.

Harry, still mostly dressed and wild looking, lines his cock up with Eggsy's arse until there's the silky brush of skin against Eggsy's fingers. Harry draws his hand away, out of himself, and holds both of his hands above his head with the firm grip of one hand. The other, he uses to drag his dick tantalizingly between Eggsy's arsehole and his balls, before he begins to press inside.

It's been so long since Eggsy's felt the stretch of a good cock inside of him, but Harry blows every previous experience out of the water by carefully swiveling his hips as he sinks down, brushing against little spots of pleasure he'd had no idea even existed inside of himself. Eggsy knots his fingers together where they're still trapped beneath Harry's grip, and arches his back on a gusty moan.

When Harry bottoms out, he drops his head down to Eggsy's and swallows him into a filthy, wide-open kiss. His hips are flush against the backs of Eggsy's thighs, sandwiching the younger man's cock between his stomach. His shirt, shoved up only as far as his waist, sticks to them both in equal measure due to the dewy sheen of sweat that's beading up onto bare skin.

He doesn't let go of Eggsy's hands, but he does let the other drift upwards until he's cupping the sharp hinge of Eggsy's jaw, trailing wondering fingers over the shell of his ear and through his hair. "I wonder," he murmurs with a sudden flexing of the hips that feels like a sucker punch for all that it knocks the breath from Eggsy's lungs. "If you can come untouched."

"No idea," Eggsy admits, gasping. "No one's ever managed it before."

A familiar feral gleam comes into Harry's eyes, and it's only now, after a week of undue stress and the glorious stretch of his arse around Harry's prick, does he recognise the look for what it is: Harry Hart, leader of an elite espionage agency and so posh it borders on absurd, is a jealous, possessive little bastard.

He proves this revelation when he grins, wicked and sharp, down into Eggsy's upturned face. "Perhaps that's because they weren't the right ones for the job."

"Yeah." Eggsy asks, crossing his ankles together against the sweaty skin of Harry's lower back. "An' who d'ya think that'd be?"

"Me," Harry snarls, and punctuates the claim with a brutal thrust out and in. "They shan't ever touch you again, Eggsy."

"Nah," he agrees, doing his best to writhe upwards and meet Harry thrust for thrust. "I'm yours, after all."

Harry - who's been fairly decent at keeping his composure, despite how he's fucking Eggsy with ninety percent of his clothing still on - proceeds to promptly and thoroughly lose his bloody mind at this pronouncement.

He lets go of Eggsy's wrist but slips his hands beneath his back, splaying his fingers wide beneath his shoulder blades, and begins to rut into Eggsy's body, urgent. Despite the desperate, shaking need that pushes him harder into Eggsy's body with every inward stroke, Harry is still Harry, and every motion is made with precision and intention. His goal: to succeed where none have before, and turn Eggsy into a quivering heap without once laying a hand upon his cock.

He's doing an absolutely phenomenal job of it as well.

Eggsy is helpless to do anything but alternate clutching desperately at Harry's shoulders, sinking his fingers into wavy chestnut locks, holding on for dear life, and try his best to catch Harry's mouth with his own whenever their faces align. There are fissures of pleasure that shiver down from his sternum and are rapidly coiling together at the base of his spine, and he's still so sensitive from his first orgasm that he fears the second isn't far behind.

"Fuck," he hisses, resisting the urge to reach between them and fist himself. He opts instead for squeezing his hands about Harry's waist, palms skimming and creeping up beneath the Kevlar blend of his still buttoned dress shirt. "Shit, 'm close."

Harry grunts out a noise of encouragement and passes his hands down Eggsy's flank before cupping them beneath the small of his back. He uses his not inconsiderable strength to tilt Eggsy's hips that much further upwards, and his next thrust forward hits home. The pressure against Eggsy's prostate, fleeting but consistent with every drag of cock inside him, lights him up inside and sends his already frayed nerves on edge.

"There," he cries out, scraping angry lines into Harry's back with his nails. "God, fucking fuck me, right there. Yeah, yeah - harder, love, 'm so close, wanna come for you. God, _Harry!"_

" _Yes,_ " Harry snarls, body hunching over Eggsy's. "Yes, Eggsy, do it for me. Come for me, my perfect, darling boy."

Eggsy arches beneath him and, with a thin, reedy whine, complies. He comes all over his stomach, and it smears into the trail of hair on his belly. Some of it transfers over to Harry's stomach when it dips down during a thrust, and he's fairly certain that Harry's dry cleaner is never going to be able to look him in the eyes again once his shirt goes in for laundering, totally spattered with spunk.

He shakes with the fallout, whimpering Harry's name and trembling violently as Harry continues to strive towards his own orgasm.

"Come inside me," Eggsy urges, the pleasure that's bordering on pain inside of him making his voice waver and crack. "Please, love, come inside me. Make me yours."

"Mine," Harry agrees with a sneer of agonised pleasure. "Oh, _Eggsy."_

He punctuates the adoring, throaty shout of Eggsy's name by thrusting in even harder than before, losing the rhythm completely, before slamming forward. He grinds his hips down, gasping for air, pelvis tight against Eggsy's backside. His arms and shoulders shiver with the strain of his orgasm as he comes, bare and deep within the greedy clutch of Eggsy's body.

He falls onto his elbows, barely able to keep from crushing Eggsy beneath him, and for a moment they simply lay there, boxed together and still intimately connected. Harry eventually withdraws from Eggsy with a shaking breath and tips over onto his side. He runs his hands over his face, pushing his hair back off his forehead, and breathes in deep and ragged pulls of air.

Eggsy slowly lowers his legs, the limbs still twitching and uncooperative, and stretches them out with a moan. "Holy shit," he says, covering his eyes with his hands and giggling to himself. "That was...so fucking good."

"Quite," is the strangled sounding agreement that comes from the sweaty lump next to him; the one that's only just now fighting to extract himself from his damp and soiled clothing. Harry wrestles his way out of his trousers, fabric sticking to his long legs, and as he starts in on unbuttoning his shirt, he leans over to press a messy kiss to Eggsy's sweaty forehead. He heaves himself off the bed with a small grunt, gathering his clothing as he walks towards his en suite toilet, and carefully deposits them into a laundry hamper.

Eggsy props himself up into his side, leaning on one bent elbow, taking a moment to enjoy the sight of Harry striding around, flushed and naked as a jaybird. He cuts a long, lithe figure, slender all over and well muscled in a way that shouldn't surprise Eggsy, but does. There's a touch of softness to his belly, brought on by the simple fact of an aging body, but Eggsy emphatically doesn't care. It's Harry's body, after all, and all the scars and defined muscled and wrinkling lines are just proof that he's still alive and kicking after all this time; long enough to love Eggsy back.

“What has you smiling like that, I wonder?” Harry says as he emerges from the bathroom, torso clean, holding a glass of water in one hand and a damp washcloth in the other. Eggsy finds it wildly endearing that Harry’s the sort who keeps drinking glasses in the toilet, and accepts the glass of tepid water with thanks.

“Dunno,” he says, taking a sip. He tracks Harry’s movements with his eyes as he comes to sit on the edge of the bed. He leans over Eggsy, bracing one hand against the mattress next to his hip, wiping the damp cloth down his chest and through the wiry hairs that lead from navel to groin. There’s an apologetic turn to his mouth when he drags it further down, careful as he cleans the swollen, tender space between his arse cheeks. “S’pose I’m just happy, me.”

Harry quirks an eyebrow up at Eggsy, smiling softly. “Indeed?”

“Course I am,” Eggsy asserts, reaching up to curl his hand around the bicep nearest him. He can hardly believe just how happy he is. It’s hard to believe that it was only this morning when he thought Harry wanted nothing to do with him - that Harry _loathed_ him. And now he’s lying in his bed, sated and well-fucked, Harry treating him with the kind of tender care that Eggsy’s only ever dreamed of receiving.

“Why didn’t you say anything sooner?” he asks quietly after a moment of Harry’s ministrations, tracing a path from Harry’s upper arm to the nape of his neck, twining his fingers in the sweat-damp hair that curls there.

Harry sighs and lays the washcloth on the glass top of the bedside table. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and smiles ruefully down at a spot just past Eggsy’s left shoulder. “It seems rather foolish now that you’re asking me to say it out loud,” he says slowly. “But I suppose I was...afraid.”

“Of what?” Eggsy asks, frowning and incredulous. “ _Me?_ Harry, I ain’t exactly an intimidating sort of bloke.”

“Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong,” Harry informs him. “Any man fears rejection from the one he loves. You’re young, Eggsy, so very young, and so _good_ . After everything that I had done to you, after all you’d already forgive me for, it seemed impossible to ask for more. Even more so, that you may return my feelings. I hardly deserved such things from you, but that didn’t stop the _wanting_.”

“That’s a load of shit,” Eggsy blurts, shoving himself into a seated position. He grips at the back of Harry’s neck with both hands, gives him a little shake. “Jesus, Harry, you think you ain’t good? You’re the fucking _best_ , yeah? I never met no one as good as you before you came into me life. You gave me a second chance, bruv, an’ everything I got now, I got because of you lettin’ me have the opportunity to earn it for meself.” He leans in and closes his eyes, catching Harry’s mouth with his own in a soft, long kiss. “I love you, Harry. Even if you’ve been a right bastard the past few months.”

Harry grimaces at the reminder of his own miserable behavior. “Ah. You must understand, Eggsy, that I’m in no way proud of my actions towards you. There’s no excusing it, and I can’t possibly hope for your forgiveness - ”

“Harry,” Eggsy starts, but he continues on over top of the protest.

“ - but I assure you that I will spend the rest of my days attempting to make it up to you.” He pauses and cups a hand against the cut of Eggsy’s jaw, strokes his thumb over the apple of Eggsy’s cheek, still flushed with exertion. “If you let me.”

Eggsy swallows and ducks his head down, bottom lip worried between his teeth, and considers the statement. “You said,” he says slowly, peering back up at Harry with a wary gaze. “Summat about not liking me in a ring that wasn’t yours?”

Harry exhales sharply and darts forward to press a lingering kiss against Eggsy’s forehead, fingers grasping at him wherever he has laid his hands. He rolls off of the bed and crosses quickly to his chest of drawers, opening the slot on the top left and rummaging around, pulling rolled up balls of socks as he searches for something. Eggsy settles back down against the mattress in the meantime. Whatever it is that he’s looking for, he finds it after a moment, and takes care to put away all of his misplaced socks before shutting the drawer and turning around.

It isn’t until he’s crawling up the foot of the bed, braced astride Eggsy’s body, that he gets a good look at the object in his hand.

It’s a small, velvet drawstring pouch, deep blue in colour and small enough to easily fit in the palm of his hand. Harry draws up onto his knees above Eggsy, opens the bag, and shakes it contents out into his palm. He holds it up between his thumb and index finger, and the light of the bedside lamp glints across it.

Eggsy reaches up, tentative and slow, and takes the ring out of Harry’s hand.

He turns it over between his fingers, examining. It’s a thicker band than the one that Merlin had presented him with earlier in the day, scuffed and well worn but showing signs of polish and care. There’s an inscription on the inside, somewhat faded from wear, that reads _27.6.1924._

“My grandfather’s wedding ring,” Harry explains, and leans down to brace his hands on either side of Eggsy’s head. “I understand if it’s too much to ask, but for the duration of your mission with Roxy, I was wondering if you might…”

“Yeah,” Eggsy agrees hastily, “Yes,” and in one quick movement he’s slipping the ring over his finger. It settles against the place where his finger meets the knuckle, and though it’s only the first time he’s ever worn this particular band, it already feels more familiar and dear to him - comfortable, even - than the shining and new ring that’s laying somewhere on the pavement outside. He takes a second to admire the sheen of it, the way it looks on his hand, before glancing up at Harry.

Harry’s staring down at Eggsy’s hand once more, but this time the look on his face is of such a soft happiness that it makes his heart thump wildly in his chest.

“Looks good on me, I think,” he manages in a rasping tone. He clears his throat, cocks his eyebrows up at Harry. “Don’t you?”

Harry lets out a laugh and smiles and him, toothy and gorgeous, and twines his right hand into the grip of Eggsy’s left. The ring warms quickly under the combined heat of their skin.

“I do,” he says, and leans in for a kiss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you all have Mr. Brightside stuck in your head now like I have for the last week. 
> 
> (Roxy and Eggsy do, eventually, manage to make it to Florida on their mission, and actually get to have a proper holiday out of it as well since it takes them only two days to close the case. the man running the seminar used to partner with his wife, until she left him to enter into a polyamorous relationship with a young British couple. cue nonsensical vendetta. 
> 
> they find the missing couples, haggard and a touch traumatized, holed up in a private cabana in a section of the resort allegedly closed for construction. an arrest is made, grateful citizens are sent back to queen and country, and Roxy and Eggsy are able to enjoy a nice, platonic vacation between mates before heading back to their antsy, brooding lovers.
> 
> Eggsy never does take the ring off after the mission.
> 
> Harry loves it.)


End file.
